Amelia Island, Florida

I'm currently in Florida working at the Georgia Bar Meeting. This year's meeting is located at the Amelia Island Plantation.

Yesterday we dragged 7yo Taz and 13yo Jessie out of bed at the crack of dawn, loaded the car to the rafters and drove to the outskirts of Savannah for the respite care trade off at the Georgia Welcome Center. Grandma and Auntie, from Charleston, are keeping Jessie until Sunday and Taz for a whole month.

Both kids are on the autism spectrum and we haven't had a break since last December. It's tough being a special needs parent and even tougher holding down full time jobs while doing so.

I felt like a free bird once we dropped of the kids and didn't even blink an eye when we got stuck in horrible construction traffic about 30 minutes later. I just enjoyed the sounds of silence or rather the sounds of our Sirius satellite radio with unlimited kid interruptions.

My stress level started dropping the minute we got back on the highway after turning the kids over to the relatives, it dropped even lower after a relaxing dinner and plummeted to near zero during a sunset walk on the beach.

And, I'm still relaxed, even though I got up at 0530 to snag sunrise beach photos, rush over to the conference center to set up electronics at 0730 and ran around meeting people until 0900 when my current seminar started.

Hopefully the sun will be out by noon so I can snag some great island photos during lunch.

Nianya